1 / 71

Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia

Gender Role Attitudes and Women’s Labor Market Participation: Opting-Out, AIDS, and The Persistent Appeal of Housewifery. Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia University of California at Davis May 2010.

kyne
Download Presentation

Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Gender Role Attitudes and Women’s Labor Market Participation:Opting-Out, AIDS, and The Persistent Appeal of Housewifery Nicole M. Fortin Department of Economics and CIFAR University of British Columbia University of California at Davis May 2010

  2. Women’s Labor Market Participation: A century of remarkable growth, but Source: Goldin (2006)

  3. Why the slowdown in the 1990s? U.S. Labor Force Participation by Gender (18-65 Year Olds) Source: U.S. BLS, March CPS and Canada, Cansim

  4. Women’s Labor Market Participation: A Popular Explanation: Opting-Out? • Given that the FLP of college-educated women had almost reach parity with men's in the mid-1990s, this stabilization or slight retreat was disappointing for the women's movement. • It has been characterized as “opting out” in the popular press (Belkin, 2003; Wallis, 2004; Story, 2005) and among sociologists (Cotter et al., 2007; Stone, 2007). • The “opting-out” phenomena has raised more skepticism among economists (Boushey, 2005; Goldin and Katz, 2007) • Women’s educational attainment has continued to rise, as well as their relative wages. • Their husband’s income has remained relatively unchanged, with an elasticity of income quite low (Blau and Kahn, 2005) • Demand-side factors (e.g. technological change, sectoral shifts; Black and Spitz-Oener, 2007) favor women’s work. • Some evidence in male-dominated jobs (Antecol, 2010).

  5. Women’s Labor Market Participation: A More Widespread Role for Attitudes and Beliefs • Placed in the recent literature that has emphasized the role of social norms and beliefs in modulating the impact of economic fundamentals on labor market outcomes, this paper appeals to changing gender role attitudes, whose progression halted in the mid-1990s, as a source of explanation for the retreat in FLP. • I will argue that gender role attitudes are the missing gender-specific factors that explain the differences in the concavity of time trends in male and female labor force participation, which remain after accounting for the usual factors, • which include years of schooling, number of children, dummies for white, married, ever divorced, preschooler present, mother ever worked, living in an intact family, and dummies (9) for religion at age 16, and region dummies (8).

  6. Women’s Labor Market Participation: A More Widespread Role for Attitudes and Beliefs • Recognizing that traditional gender role attitudes, • which capture the notion the husband should be the main “breadwinner" and the wife the main “homemaker", are not necessarily antagonistic to egalitarian attitudes, • which capture the notion that women are as capable as men in the workforce (more an equal opportunity view), the impact of both type of attitudes is studied. • Accommodating both views or identities (“homemaker” vs. “career women”) in the Work-Life Balance (WLB) has arguably become the new face of feminism. • Gender role attitudes are thought to impact not only the work decisions of married women, but also those of lone-mothers who have the option of relying on government assistance, or indeed the career and lifestyle choices of single women.

  7. Table 2. Women's Averages by Birth Cohort for Selected Years

  8. Women’s Labor Market Participation: Role for Attitudes and Beliefs Economic Fundamentals: Education, Wages, Non-wage Income Woman’s Decision to Participate in the Labor Market Mother’s Labor Force Participation Who am I ? Career Woman or Stay at Home Mom Other influences

  9. Women’s Labor Market Participation: A More Widespread Role for Attitudes and Beliefs • When gender role attitudes observed in the past are used to explain current labor force participation (as with the NLS72), the issue of reverse causality does not arise. • But when gender role attitudes and FLP are observed contemporaneously (as with the GSS), potential endogeneity arises as an important challenge in the analysis of the impact of these attitudes. • The analysis uses a double prong instrumental variable strategy appealing to extraneous attitudes found in the GSS, and to an exogenous shock to attitudes, namely the AIDS scare, which may have acted as a counter-current to the “Pill Revolution”. • The AIDS scare is thought to be an exogenous shock to attitudes, but perhaps only one factor among others affecting these attitudes.

  10. Women’s Labor Market Participation: Role for Attitudes and Beliefs Economic Fundamentals: Education, Wages, Non-wage Income Woman’s Decision to Participate in the Labor Market Mother’s Labor Force Participation Who am I ? Career Woman or Stay at Home Mom Other influences

  11. Women’s Labor Market Participation: Role for Attitudes and Beliefs Economic Fundamentals: Education, Wages, Non-wage Income Woman’s Decision to Participate in the Labor Market Mother’s Labor Force Participation Who am I ? Career Woman or Stay at Home Mom Other influences AIDS Scare

  12. Contribution How is the argument supported empirically? • This paper contributes to the study of the impact of gender role attitudes on FLP in several novel ways, by 1) Accounting for non-linear time-period, life-cycle and cohort effects, as well as a host of background variables, using data from the 1977-2006 General Social Surveys (GSS) 2) Using longitudinal data from the single cohort National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72) to address concerns about reverse causality and corroborate the age-period-cohort specification. 3) Using a double prong instrumental variables strategy based on extraneous attitudes about sexual morality and political views found in the GSS, and on an exogenous shock to attitudes, namely the mid-1990s AIDS scareusing repeated cross-sectional data from the 1988-2006 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) in the context of a variant of two-sample two-stage least squares (TS2LS) to address concerns about endogeneity.

  13. Findings • Gender role attitudes, whose secular trends reversed in the mid-1990s when the AIDS crisis peaked, are found to explain • at least a thirdof the recent leveling-off in FLP, that is, as much as all the usual variables combined • while general cultural trends towards more conservative social, religious and political views do not. • More precisely, the estimated coefficients of gender role attitudes imply that the 2 points rise in average traditional attitudes and 4 points decline in average egalitarian attitudes from 1993-94 to 2004-06 would account for one half to a full percentage point decline in FLP.

  14. Findings: Impact of gender role attitudes on FLP more precisely

  15. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

  16. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

  17. Findings:among sub-groups • The results are strongest among women with less than a college degree, for these women the AIDS scare as an instrument is actually more significant. • Among married women, where the analysis include husband’s income, gender role attitudes account for about one third of the time trends. • Among college-educated married women (about 800 obs), the results are less precise and not as strong, leaving room for explanations based on negative feedback from the labor market, such as glass ceiling effects. • Among African-American women however, self-rated health is found to be as important as gender role attitudes in accounting for the evolution of FLP.

  18. Remainder of the Paper • Relevant Literature • Theoretical Underpinnings: Economic Identity Theory and the AIDS Scare • Data and Descriptive Evidence • Time-period, life-cycle and cohorts effects in FLP • Measurement of gender role attitudes • Subjective risk of HIV/AIDS • Econometric Specification and variant of TS2SLS • Regression Results • Main results • Longitudinal analysis with the NLS-72 • Instrumental variables strategies • Alternative hypotheses (divorce, religious, social and political conservatism, ethnic and health factors) • Sub-groups (African-American women, College-educated women vs. women with less than college, men) • Conclusion

  19. Relevant Literature • Impact of gender role attitudes on FLP and other labor market outcomes • Levine (1993), Vella (1994), Fortin (2005), Fernandez and Fogli (2005), Charles, Guryan, and Pan (2009) • Intergeneration transmission of gender role attitudes • Fernandez, Fogli and Olivetti (2004), Farré-Olalla and Vella (2007) • Dynamic macro-models with gender role attitudes • Fernandez (2007) and Fogli and Veldkamp(2007) • Cohort-effects – “Pill Revolution” • Goldin and Katz (2002), Goldin (2004) and Bailey (2006) • Identity and Gender • Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2002), Goldin and Shim (2004), Goldin (2006) • Impact of AIDS Crisis, Mad Cow Scare • Ahituv, Hotz and Philipson (1996), Adda (2007), Johnson and Raphael (2009)

  20. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory • Akerlofand Kranton (2000, 2002, 2005) have proposed to incorporate one's sense of self as an important element of the utility function. • Identity translates cultural values and social norms into motivational factors: agents act as they “ should” given their chosen social category. • Benabou and Tirole (2006) have introduced competing identities that are competing for time or resources, such as a traditional identity and a modern identity, where investing in the identity-capital of one can damage the other. • Here I retain some of the basic elements of their framework: retain the basic elements of the framework: • identity-endowment, identity-asset and saliency of identities.

  21. Theoretical Underpinnings:Economic Identity Theory • The “Women’s Liberation Movement” can be seen as having proposed the new identity of “career women” equal to men in the workplace, and assuming their own identity by keeping their birth name (Goldin and Shim, 2004). • The “Pill Revolution” enabled the new career woman to be a “liberated” woman in control of her sexuality and fertility, that is, created a disassociation between the “marriage market” and the “sex market”. • In that context, the AIDS scare may have acted as a counter-current to the Pill Revolution making the lifestyle of the single, but condom-able, career woman less comfortable. • Other health scares, such as the 2003 Mad Cow and SARS scare, the 2009 Swine Flu scare, also had profound impacts on attitudes, identities and even trade.

  22. Data on the AIDS Scare • Data from the National Health Interview Surveys which have been conducted yearly, for over fifty years, as one of the major data collection programs of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) combine information on health characteristics and many demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. • Designed to monitor the health of the U.S. population, these large repeated cross-sectional surveys comprise from 20,000 to 30,000 observations a year. • In the late 1980s, the NCHS added they an “AIDS Knowledge and Attitudes" supplement; in 1997 a subset of that module was incorporated into the core components “Sample Adult” . • The information one's own chances of getting HIV/AIDS is from the question: “What are your chances of getting HIV/AIDS? High/Already have HIV/AIDS (1), Medium (2/3), Low (1/3), or None (0).“

  23. Subjective Risk of HIV/AIDS √Women by Birth Cohorts NHIS 1988-2006 Note: Average of “What are your chances of getting HIV/AIDS? High /Already have HIV/AIDS (1), Medium (2/3), Low (1/3), or None (0).“

  24. Data on FLP, Gender Role Attitudes, and Other Variables • The main data are drawn the 1977 to 2006 General Social Surveys (GSS) conducted yearly (or bi-yearly) by National Opinion Research Center. • Each cross-section comprises 1372 to 2992 observations per year with a total of total of 20,000 females and 19,194 males between the ages of 18 and 65. • But the sample for which consistent gender role attitudes are measured comprises a subset of about 9000 women, because the same questions are not asked in each survey. • Data from National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72) which follows the first post-Pill cohort (1954-55 birth cohorts) are also used.

  25. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)FLP by Birth Cohort

  26. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)FLP by Birth Cohort

  27. Age-Period-Cohort (APC) Specifications • Various flexible A-P-C specifications show the following parsimonious specification captures well the time trend in FLP • Yit = α0+ α1T + α2T2 + α3 A +γ4A2 + Σjδj Bj + βgGit+ βxXit+ εit • where Yit is the outcome of interest • where T is time , A is age and Bjare the 8 birth cohort categories • where Gitare gender role attitudes that capture the saliency of traditional or egalitarian identities • where Xitiindividual characteristics that capture the identity-endowment(living in intact family, mother ever worked, religion at 16, etc.), identity-asset(education, children, married, divorced, etc.) variables • For simplicity, the model is estimated with a Linear Probability Model, but corroborated by a Probit model

  28. Table 3. Time-period, Life-cycle and Cohort Effects in Labor Market Participation

  29. Gender Role Attitudes √ • In the NLS72, ten questions were asked in 1979: 5 on traditional views and 5 on egalitarian attitudes

  30. Gender Role Attitudes • In the GSS, out of a total of eight questions on gender role attitudes, only four are asked in the 2000s

  31. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006)Traditional Attitudes of Women by Birth Cohort (FEFAM)

  32. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Egalitarian Attitudes of Women by Birth Cohort

  33. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTable 4. Baseline Results – GSS 1977-2006

  34. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPMain Linear Probability Model Results • At -0.246 (0.022), the impact of traditional attitudes implies that the slight rise [0.028 (0.011)] in average traditional attitudes from 0.373 in 1994 to 0.401 in 2006 would account for a [(0.401-0.373)*-0.246*100] 0.7 percentage point decline in FLP. • By comparison, the increase in years of schooling from 13.04 in 1994 to 13.12 in 2006 would have lead to an increase 0.18 percentage point. • Importantly, the introduction of traditional attitudes reduces the magnitude of quadratic term of the time trend from -0.018 to -0.011, rendering it insignificant and comparable in point estimate to that of men.

  35. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

  36. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTable 5. Single-Cohort Longitudinal Data –NLS72

  37. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLP Table 6. Married Women

  38. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPInstrumental Variables Strategies • In the GSS, questions about gender role attitudes and labor market decisions are asked contemporaneously, this raises the issue of possible biases associated with the avoidance of cognitive dissonance (Akerlof and Dickens, 1982). • Letting , equation (1) can be rewritten as • Cognitive dissonance generates an errors-in-variables, where denote the true attitudes. • In the classical case, , this would lead to an attenuation bias in .

  39. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPInstrumental Variables Strategies • This issue is addressed using a double prong instrumental variables strategy with some instruments coming from the GSS and another instrument from a TS2SLS. • The instruments from the GSS are answers to questions about the respondents’ political viewsand attitudes towards sexual relations. • These variables are correlated with gender role attitudes and are thought to impact labor market decisions only through attitudes toward whether women should work outside the home or not.

  40. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPInstrumental Variables Strategy √ • The exact questions are: • There's been a lot of discussion about the way morals and attitudes about sex are changing in this country. If a man and woman have sex relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all? [VAR:PREMARSX] • “We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. I'm going to show you a seven point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal point 1 to extremely conservative point 7? Where would you place yourself on this scale?” [VAR:POLVIEWS]

  41. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006) Premarital Sex Wrong - Women by Birth Cohort Risky

  42. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1977-2006)Liberal Political Views - Women by Birth Cohort

  43. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLP Table 7. 2SLS Results - GSS 1977-2006

  44. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTwo Sample 2-Stage Least Squares Variant • In the usual case (Angrist and Krueger, 1991; Inoue and Solon, 2005) , both samples contain on the instruments. • Here the instrument is available only in sample 2. So an estimate of the instrument in sample 1 has to be constructed. • Let be the excluded instrument not available in sample 1 and let • From each cross-section of sample 2 (the NHIS), I estimate where is a M-vector of age dummies. Stacking the estimates results in a M ΧT matrix .

  45. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPTwo Sample 2-Stage Least Squares • An estimate of the subjective risk of HIV/AIDS is constructed as • where is a T-vector of time dummies, assuming as in Inoue and Solon that . • Writing the linear projection of included instruments • onto , the residuals then net out the included instruments, and can be used as excluded instruments to identify and . • In other words, the instrumentation relies on the fact that women of different ages at different time periods evaluated their chances of getting HIV/AIDS differently.

  46. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLP Table 8. TS2SLS Results - GSS 1988-2006

  47. Yearly Averages and Time Trends in FLP

  48. Impact of Gender Role Attitudes on FLPAlternative Hypotheses • I explored various alternative hypotheses • Increase in divorce rates and attitudes toward divorce • Social conservatism (attitudes toward premarital sex) • Political conservatism • Increased religiosity (church attendance, e.g. Glaeser and Sacerdote, 2007; bible inerrancy also tested, e.g. Sherkat, 2000) • Cultural background (42 dummies on ethnic ancestry, e.g. Fernandez and Fogli (2005), Zaiceva and Zimmerman (2007)) • Increasing rates of ill-health (morbid obesity, e.g. Cawley, 2004)

  49. Descriptive Evidence (GSS 1972-2006)Church Attendance by Birth Cohort

More Related